N. Ireland police officer shot dead in ambush

[jimmy olsen]

And things seemed so promising there.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29584485/

N. Ireland police officer shot dead in ambush
Killing comes 2 days after pair of British soldiers slain outside army base

updated 10:11 p.m. ET, Mon., March. 9, 2009

BELFAST, Northern Ireland - Gunmen killed an officer in an attack on a Northern Ireland police patrol Monday, authorities said, just 48 hours after Irish Republican Army dissidents shot to death two British soldiers. The shootings fanned fears of a return to retaliatory violence after years of fragile peace.

The latest killing came even as British security chiefs appealed for public help to catch the soldiers' killers — a hunt that challenges Catholics to inform on their own as never before.

"We are staring into the abyss," warned a moderate Catholic politician, Dolores Kelly, after police confirmed that the officer was fatally shot in the head while sitting in his patrol car in the religiously divided town of Craigavon.

No group claimed responsibility, but politicians blamed the Real IRA, the splinter group that admitted blame for Saturday's fatal shooting of two soldiers who were collecting pizzas from outside an army base.

Together, these were the first killings of British security forces in Northern Ireland since 1997 — the year before rival British Protestant and Irish Catholic politicians tried to leave behind decades of bloodshed by striking a peace deal that called for paramilitary disarmament and a future of Catholic-Protestant cooperation in government.

"There is little point appealing to the people who planned and did this, but all of us have to realize we are on the brink of something absolutely awful," said Kelly, a member of a Catholic-Protestant panel that oversees the police. "All of us have to get together to pull ourselves back from the brink. A tiny handful of people with nothing to say and nothing to offer cannot be allowed to destroy so much."

IRA dissidents suspected
So far, Protestant paramilitary outlaws have maintained their 1994 cease-fire. Before the latest attack, Protestant politicians appealed for their side's extremists not to attack Catholic civilians in revenge.

A Protestant politician on the policing panel, Basil McCrea, said he had no doubt that IRA dissidents also committed Monday night's attack. He said he expected the Real IRA to mount another attack, "but we didn't think it would be so soon."

The surge in dissident violence is raising particular pressure on Sinn Fein, the IRA-linked party that is the major Irish Catholic player in Northern Ireland's power-sharing administration with Protestants.

Protestants appealed to Sinn Fein leaders to take the next, painful step away from past beliefs and inform police about Real IRA die-hards sheltering in the most hard-line Irish nationalist districts of this British territory.

Police investigating Saturday's killings conceded they would have difficulty catching and prosecuting the two gunmen and their getaway driver unless the killers' neighbors break Northern Ireland's traditional code of silence on such matters. Any who do risk attacks against them and their families.

"We need public support. We will do everything in our power to protect those people who come forward," said Chief Superintendent Derek Williamson, the policeman leading the investigation. He said Real IRA sympathizers were likely harboring the killers somewhere in a Catholic district.

Eyes on Sinn Fein
Sinn Fein lawmaker Gerry Kelly, who once led IRA car-bomb attacks in London and the biggest prison escape in British history, said many in the party's grass roots understood they needed to cooperate with police. But they still considered helping police to arrest IRA dissidents a bridge too far.

"Within the republican psyche there's an aversion to the whole idea," said Kelly, who pledged that Sinn Fein leaders were already challenging their own supporters to isolate Real IRA activists — if not finger them to police.

"We will support the police's investigations into this. And we will do it actively, speaking publicly," he said.

Protestant skepticism about Sinn Fein's commitment to enforcing law and order in Northern Ireland has stunted the development of their four-party coalition. It formed in 2007 but has achieved little of substance amid incessant squabbling — particularly about justice powers.

Sinn Fein wants to help exercise control over the police and courts, but the Protestant side insists those powers should stay in British government hands in London until Sinn Fein goes beyond saying they support the police.

Leaders of the Protestant side of the coalition emphasized Monday — before the killing of the policeman — that they must see hard evidence of Sinn Fein's changed intent, with tip-offs that lead to arrests of the Real IRA unit responsible for Saturday's attack.

Code of silence
Nigel Dodds, whose Democratic Unionist Party represents the British Protestant majority, said Sinn Fein and IRA members must know plenty about the current membership of their Real IRA rivals.

Hard-liners founded the splinter group 12 years ago when most IRA members decided to cease fire so that Sinn Fein could negotiate with Britain and Protestant leaders. Their talks produced the Good Friday peace accord of 1998 and led, eventually, to IRA disarmament and Belfast's 22-month-old experiment in power-sharing.

"The test will be how much people in the republican community are urged, and actually come forward, with information about these killings," said Dodds, who is finance minister in the power-sharing coalition. "Because there's people out there who undoubtedly know who these people are, and they need to be seen to take action and give that information to the police."

Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionists remain determined to maintain a common public front despite the killings. Democratic Unionist leader Peter Robinson and Sinn Fein deputy leader Martin McGuinness, the top two power-sharing figures, announced they will start a joint weeklong tour of the United States on Tuesday — two days later than planned because of the Real IRA bloodshed.

Getaway car
Police revealed new details Monday about Saturday's attack as hundreds of civilians delivered floral bouquets to the bullet-pocked, bloodstained scene of the crime: the entrance of the Massereene army base in Antrim, a mostly Protestant town west of Belfast that houses Royal Engineers training for deployment in Afghanistan.

Williamson said police studies of TV surveillance footage had documented how two masked Real IRA men armed with assault rifles waited in bushes across the road as off-duty, unarmed soldiers walked out of their fort to collect pizzas from two Domino's Pizza couriers. He said the attackers fired more than 60 bullets in about 30 seconds, closing quickly on foot to fire rounds point-blank at the prone victims.

He said police did have one excellent potential source of evidence that does not require public support: the gunmen's getaway car. The Real IRA appeared to have tried to set it on fire, to destroy forensic evidence, but failed.

In its statement of responsibility the Real IRA said it deliberately shot the Domino's workers because they were British "collaborators" providing food to the enemy.

Brigadier George Norton, the senior army commander responsible for more than 4,000 Northern Ireland-based soldiers, spoke to journalists Monday at the scene of the shooting.

Norton rejected the idea that the army had grown careless to permit soldiers to collect fast-food deliveries in a publicly visible pattern.

"The army is living in Northern Ireland as part of the community. We have to lead as normal a life as possible."


Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.

[Pedrito]

This cannot be Languish! there are no typos in J.O.'s thread title! 

L.

[Neil]

And his name is all in lowercase, too.  What an asshole.

[barkdreg]

This could be bad. I hope the Protestants don't start any revenge actions.

[Brazen]

I blame Seedy for stirring.

[Grinning_Colossus]

They couldn't even wait until St. Patrick's Day?

[garbon]

I liked the thread better on the old forum, about that first attack, which turned into a discussion of pizza.

[Sheilbh]

Actually things are promising.  When's the last time Sinn Fein and the DUP united to condemn an attack on British servicemen and police officers?

[Darth Wagtaros]

They couldn't even wait until St. Patrick's Day?

Thought it was more traditional to wait until the Orangemen marched?

[Josquius]

Yeah, no big emergency.
Just a small group of idiots.